On Tuesday 24 October, the new president of the Bundestag and former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, called for reforms in Greece to continue before considering any debt relief measure.
“Greece's challenge over the next decade is not its debt, but to continue its course for an uninterrupted improvement in its economy”, Schäuble told an interview with Greek Skai TV. A few days after he attended his last ever Eurogroup meeting (see EUROPE 11879), the former German finance minister, one of the main proponents of austerity measures in Greece, went on to say that Greece's creditors should not scale down the country's fiscal targets or adopt measures to relieve its debt.
These comments came even though the Eurogroup meetings of 22 May (see EUROPE 11794) and 15 June this year (see EUROPE 11810) saw an agreement on ending the second monitoring mission of the third Greek bailout plan and approved the principle of a primary budgetary surplus (not including servicing of the debt) of 3.5% of GDP until 2022, before maintaining it at around 2% of GDP until 2060. Greece's institutional creditors also agreed on possible debt relief measures at the end of the third bailout plan in summer 2018, to ensure that the debt is viable – an absolute prerequisite for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to come on board the plan.
In his interview with the Greek television channel, Schäuble also touched briefly upon the socio-economic measures adopted by the government of Alexis Tsipras in the framework of the second monitoring mission (see EUROPE 11779). The decision to make budget cuts to pensions rather than tax ship-owners was taken by the Greek authorities and is not encouraged by Germany, according to Schäuble.
Greece will furthermore soon have to enter the third monitoring mission of this third Greek bailout plan, which Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras hopes to conclude as soon as possible (see EUROPE 11859). (Original version in French by Lucas Tripoteau)